Mighty No. 9 Producer Expresses Remorse Over Issues

Things have not been good for Comcept lately. The Red Ash video game Kickstarter fell through, and then their flagship game, Mighty No. 9, just saw a delay from a September 2015 release into sometime in 2016. On top of all that, a lot of their goodwill from fans and the press seems to be dropping away like grains of sand in an hourglass.

In the case of Mighty No. 9 specifically, much of the responsibility rests on the shoulders of producer Nick Yu. And knowing how disappointed people are makes him and his team “feel bad. Really, really bad.”

Engadget took the opportunity to sit down with Yu to discuss matters related to both Kickstarter and the delay of Mighty No. 9. Regarding the bug which delayed the game:

How has Mighty No. 9 been progressing over the past few months?

It’s good, however, we just announced that we’re delaying the release of the game until Q1 2016. The game is pretty much done. We were doing bug fixes and we found some bugs in the network system that will affect the multiplayer. It’s not like a “showstopper” bug, but it’ll make players really frustrated. We don’t want that to be the experience for our players, so that’s why we decided to delay and polish the game a little bit more.

A common refrain (including from me) has been the idea that they could have at least released the single player game first, then added the multiplayer later. After all, games such as Shovel Knight have delivered the main bill of goods first, with the extras to come later, so why not here?

As it turns out, however, it’s not quite that simple:

In order for us to just give out the single-player… It’s difficult to explain this in short terms. When you’re submitting a game to the platforms, there’s a testing, an approval process for PlayStation, Xbox, all that stuff. The way it is, you have to submit the product. If we were to give out the game to backers, they have to choose their platform. Either way, we have to go through that approval process for us to give that to the backers.

If we were to just give out the single-player, that means we have to make the whole package as a single-player game. Once that’s out, we can no longer say this game is single-player and multiplayer; we can only say this is single-player. When that goes to the retailer, you can no longer sell the product as a single-player/multiplayer game. Because it’s not, even if you add a patch later on. And the price will just break. Because it’s only single-player. It’s not that we don’t want to give that to the backers — we can’t.

For us to make that change — only single-player, then patch multiplayer later — simply put, the approval process would be doubled, and we would have to spend even more time to break those two aspects of the game apart into separate packages. Submit the single-player first, get approval, fix the multiplayer campaign, get approval again. And there’ll be even more quality assurance because we’re taking stuff out. All that together, I think the game will be out with them together before we could’ve pulled them apart, even with the delay.

As for the backers, there may yet still be something in store for them soon…

That’s the reality, however, I know we should think about something to show that we are really sorry to the backers. We’re looking to see if there’s something we can do for the backers. But, we’re looking into that, and we’re looking to get a proper release date, seeing how bad the bug is. How fast we can fix it. Once we know that, we’ll announce the release date properly. For now it’s just Q1 2016.

The full interview is quite a bit longer and goes into much greater detail than the excerpts seen here. For their conversation in its entirety, you’ll want to click this link.

News credit: via Nintendo Everything, Dr. Volt Alessandro Arcade

LBD "Nytetrayn"

David Oxford, or “LBD ‘Nytetrayn’,” as he is sometimes also known, is a freelance writer of many varied interests who resides in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. If you’re interested in hiring him, please drop him a line at david.oxford (at) nyteworks.net.

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